A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate

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Viewing chapter Questions He Asks (50 quotes)
It is more important to know what the right questions are than what the right answers are.
Marshall McLuhan
Jean Pare interview, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 19
Quote #5879
Year: 1973
Chapters: Dropout | McLuhanisms & Zingers | Questions He Asks
I propose a means of bridging this gap between the world of the genius and the child. It is this: instead of broadcasting our learning, let us advertise our problems; instead of giving the answers, let us give the questions. Twentieth century man has been called one who runs down the street shouting: “I have the answers. What are the questions?”
Marshall McLuhan
From an untitled, undated 4-page typescript in praise of ignorance (early 1970s), p 2
Quote #5880
Year: 1970
Chapters: Advice | Problem Solving | Questions He Asks
We might ask ourselves what is the consequence of living in one age and thinking in another.
“The Nerves of Government”, 1964, p 3
Quote #5881
Year: 1964
Is it natural that one medium should appropriate and exploit another?
McLuhan: Hot and Cool, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn, 1967, p. 156. This question also serves as the title of an essay in this book, beginning on p 151
Quote #5882
Year: 1967
Chapters: Environment | Extension Theory | Media Effects | Media Reprocess Media
How many parts of the body are extended in a single computer?
“Social Impact of the Computer”, March 20-23,1979, speech in Monaco, typescript, p 3
Quote #5883
Year: 1979
What happened to the book after the newspaper? To the book after the movie? To the book after radio and television? Nobody seems to know.
“The Medium Is the Message” (1960), in McLuhan Unbound #17, (2017), p 14
Quote #5884
Year: 1960
Chapter: Media Study
What are some of the advantages of the ideogram over our alphabet?
Projects and Questions -Writing, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 40
Quote #5885
Year: 1960
By contrast, does a form of writing that favors attention to one-thing-at-a-time foster instability and change?
Projects and Questions -Writing, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 40
Quote #5886
Year: 1960
Chapter: Media Study
How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes?
The Mechanical Bride, 1951, p 73
Quote #5887
Year: 1951
Chapter: Change

Drawn to McLuhan #10

Black-and-white illustrated diptych with a bold headline banner, featuring pen-and-ink style portraits of two men (labeled George Meredith and James Joyce) each with a speech bubble of quoted text and a caption giving their names, nationalities, and life dates.
“What he said of others was often true of himself.” On George Meredith: “He is so wholly sui generis that neglect of him involves neglect of nothing else, implies no deficiency of taste, no literary limitation. He cannot be placed.” On James Joyce: “For Joyce has solved numerous problems which science has not yet formulated as problems.”
Photorealistic image of a grand library hall with a sign reading "Robo-losophers," lined with curtained booths labeled with names of philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, etc.), each containing a robotic/statue figure, while students converse in the aisle.
“The means that are destroying our tradition, our culture, and values, could be used to preserve and sustain them.”
Color illustration of an oversized, glowing television set surrounded by a dense field of empty speech bubbles and broken eggshells, with small crowds of people gathered below on either side.
“The advent of TV may carry us beyond speech altogether.”
Color cartoon illustration of a pilot and a woman eating at an airport café table, the woman saying in a speech bubble that the pilot “said to the pilot, ‘Knock knock’…”, with an airliner and ground crew visible through the window.
“Our time has discovered that there is a language of Forms and Gestures – a language which has its own grammar and syntax.”
Color cartoon illustration of scientists in lab coats dancing amid laboratory equipment, one exclaiming in a speech bubble about subatomic particles, in a particle physics lab set.
“Science and magic have married each other.”
Photorealistic image of an older man laughing heartily at the head of a seminar table, surrounded by smiling students, in front of a blackboard in a book-lined classroom.
“I want a career where I get to laugh a lot.”
Color illustration of an older, bespectacled man in a tweed jacket seated at a cluttered writing desk in a book-lined study, scratching his head while writing, with a copy of "Understanding Media" stacked nearby.
“I don’t pretend to understand my stuff. After all, my writing is very difficult.”
Color illustration of dejected, unemployed-looking people sitting on a city sidewalk holding cardboard signs ("MBA Was Useless," "College Degree $0 Return"), while a line of business-suited robots carrying briefcases walks past in the background.
“How much more Know-How is needed to make human life obsolete?”
Color illustration of a bespectacled man in a suit with three overlapping, motion-blurred heads (as if spinning), pointing toward a spinning desk globe encircled by ribbons labeled "Global Village" and "Medium Is the Message."
“Globes make my head spin. By the time I’ve located the place, they’ve changed the boundaries.”
Photo composite of two "hear no evil, see no evil" style classical marble busts (Plato covering his ears, Aristotle covering his eyes) beside a sepia-toned portrait photograph of an older man in a suit resting his chin on his hand, with a speech bubble of quoted text above them and name captions below.
“Why has no one in history — not Plato, certainly not Aristotle, no philosopher, ever regarded our technologies grammatically, asking how they inflect on us?”
Why should pre-literate people have no concept of words as referring to things, but only of words as being things?
Projects and Questions -Writing, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 40
Quote #5888
Year: 1960
Is the man of the ear a conservative, and the man of the eye a liberal?
NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 40
Quote #5889
Year: 1960
Is it possible for a mathematical proposition or demonstration to have content?
Projects and Questions -Writing, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 41
Quote #5890
Year: 1960
Is the print, engraving, cartoon, etc., a low or high-definition form of statement?
Projects and questions – Prints, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 60
Quote #5891
Year: 1960
Chapter: Cartoons, Comics
How would a large population know how to feel about a large number of ever-changing matters without a daily press?
Projects and Questions -Press, In NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 73
Quote #5892
Year: 1960
Chapter: News
What effect did the photograph have on the manner of writing newspaper stories?
Projects and Questions – Photography, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 81
Quote #5893
Year: 1960
What was the effect of photography on international affairs?
Projects and Questions – Photography, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 81
Quote #5894
Year: 1960
Did Technicolor movies make travel unnecessary?
Projects and Questions – Photography, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 81
Quote #5895
Year: 1960
Is there more participation, less passivity in film clips than in a whole movie?
Projects and Questions – Photography, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 81
Quote #5896
Year: 1960
What has been the effect pf the photograph on human attire from the tintype onward?
Projects and Questions – Photography, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 81
Quote #5897
Year: 1960
Why did the telegraph, the telephone and the phonograph become so tightly intertwined in their origin and development?
Projects and Questions- Phonograph, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 109
Quote #5898
Year: 1960
What has been the effect of the phonograph on the development of the orchestra?
Projects and Questions- Phonograph, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 109
Quote #5899
Year: 1960
Why should the early phase of the phonograph have created a hardening of the musical categories?
Projects and Questions- Phonograph, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 109
Quote #5900
Year: 1960
How does the LP [the long-playing record] alter the roles of the phonograph?
Projects and Questions- Phonograph, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 109
Quote #5901
Year: 1960
Why should the broken lines of the television mosaic emphasize the sculptural contours of objects?
Projects and Questions -Television, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 133
Quote #5902
Year: 1960
Chapter: Television
When does a mechanical code of transmission of information itself become a language? Under what conditions does a language revert to a code of transmission? With our new coding devices today [such as movies]… we are setting about to establish whether these means of transmission have themselves so deeply altered human sensibilities and reshaped human institutions as to have acquired the status of new languages.
“The Medium Is the Message”, (1960), p 22
Quote #5903
Year: 1960
Chapters: Language | Media as Form | Media Study
What happens when the ad makers take over all the popular myths and poetry?
Are ads themselves the main form of industrial culture?
“Freedom-American Style” in The Mechanical Bride, (1951), p 117
Quote #5904
Year: 1951
Chapter: Advertising
Why has sculpture traditionally been spoken of as the voice of silence?
Projects and Questions, in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 133
Quote #5905
Year: 1960
Speech as organized stutter is based on time. What does speech do to space?
NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 133
Quote #5906
Year: 1960
If speech is organized stutter, is [unspeaking] stutter disorganized speech?
NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 133
Quote #5907
Year: 1960
The book itself was the first mechanical mass medium. What is really being asked, of course, is: Can books monopoly of knowledge survive the challenge of the new languages? The answer is, no. What should be asked is: What can print do better than any other medium and is that worth doing?
Mass Media and Retention , in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 157
Quote #5908
Year: 1960
How much of sixteenth-century Protestantism was political ploy and how much doctrinal conviction?
“Liturgy and the Media” (1973), p 14
Quote #5909
Year: 1973
[Commenting on the Lord Calvert’s whiskey “Men of Distinction” ad]
Is it what’s in the jigger that makes them bigger?
The Mechanical Bride, (1951) p 56
Quote #5910
Year: 1951
Is not Poe's anomalous combination of Romantic self-knowledge and rationalistic procedure somewhat the result of his anomalous Southern experience? Did not the curious time-lag created in the South by the belated strength of Jeffersonian rationalism produce a remarkable fusion of reason and romantic angst? In Europe that fusion never occurred in the same stark way because Rousseauistic attrition of the Enlightenment intervened. But in Edgar Poe one observes the unmediated union as it were of the attitudes of Voltaire and Novalis, of Shaftesbury and Lord Byron.
“Footprints in the Sands of Crime”, in The Sewanee Review (1946), p 634
Quote #5911
Year: 1946
Chapter: Poe, Edgar Allan
[Questions he often asked students and friends upon seeing them afresh]
What’s on your mind? What have you learned since we last talked? Heard any good jokes?
David Nostbakken, in Paolo Granata’s Monday Night Webinar, June 8, 2020
Quote #5912
Year: 2020
[Father John] Culkin recalled that, whenever he returned from a conference, McLuhan always asked him the same two questions. “Did you learn anything? Get any new jokes?”
Reported from McLuhan’s Funeral, Holy Rosary Church, Toronto, January 3, in the Toronto Star, January 4, 1981, p A13
Quote #5913
Year: 1981
It is more important to know what the right questions are than what the right answers are.
“Jean Pare interview”, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 19
Quote #5914
Year: 1973
Chapter: McLuhanisms & Zingers
Personally, I have always found questions more interesting than answers, and probes more exciting than product.
Letter to John Polanyi, January 4, 1974, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 487
Quote #5915
Year: 1974
A BOOK IS THE DEATH OF A TREE… What is a TV program the death of?
McLuhan Hot and Cool (1967), p 117
Quote #5916
Year: 1967
How far was the rapid development of complex musical composition the result of ease in visualizing musical structures as a result of written and printed scores?
Review of Paul Klee (1953), p 78
Quote #5917
Year: 1953
Is TV a massive Bauhaus program of re-education for the North American sense life? That is to query whether the TV image is, in effect, a haptic, tactile, or synthetic mode of interplay among the senses, a fulfillment on a popular plane of the estehtic program of Hildebrand, Berenson, Wolfflin, Paul Klee and Giedion.
“Inside the Five Sense Sensorium” (1961), p 50
Quote #5918
Year: 1961
How much behaviorism is needed to make a big mental proletariat behave?
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 26
Quote #5919
Year: 1951
What happens when the ad makers take over all the popular myths and poetry?
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 117
Quote #5920
Year: 1951
Chapter: Advertising
If there were not coverage of any sort of war, no reports, no information, how would this change the nature of war?
“Information Hunt Looms Big” (1967), p 5
Quote #5921
Year: 1967
Chapter: War
Can anyone make the news save in print? On TV can anyone be said to have made the Cavett show or the “Today” show? If not, why not?
“Sharing the News” (1971), p 8
Quote #5922
Year: 1971
Can all of these forms of visual experience now be by-passed by acoustic and discarnate Man of the present electric world environment ?
Liturgy And Media” in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 23, reprinted in reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 131 
Quote #5923
Year: 1973
Chapters: From Tribal to Literate | Hardware / Software | Today’s Transition
One might ask how many parts of the body are extended in a single
computer, quite apart from the computer circuit itself which is an extension
of our central nervous system.
“Social Impact of the Computer,” 1978, pages 9b and 10 of typescript of a speech he delivered at the World Convention on Payment Systems and Electronic Funds Transfer, Monte Carlo, 20-23 March, 1979. Typescript, p 3
Quote #5924
Year: 1978
Chapter: Computer
Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?
The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p 28
Quote #5925
Year: 1962
For Vico contains Wordsworth, Freud, and Malinowski by anticipation in answering the questions: "exactly how do people so remote in time or culture or condition as
Lucy Gray or Ivanhoe or a neurotic or a Trobriander feel? What is the world they know?"
“Inside Blake and Hollywood”, 1947, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2017)
Quote #5926
Year: 1947
Why should the broken line of the television mosaic emphasize the sculptural contours of objects?
McLuhan Hot and Cool, 1967, p 158 
Quote #5927
Year: 1967
Chapter: Television
This raises a major issue for us all to study: Namely, when does a mechanical code of transmission of information itself become a language? Under what conditions does a language revert to a code of transmission? With our new coding devices today such as movies and TV, tapes, discs, radio, teletype and so on, we are setting about to establish whether these means of transmission have themselves so deeply altered human sensibilities and re-shaped human institutions and attitudes as to have acquired the status of new languages.
From a speech to the NAEB, Sept. 23, 1959, reprinted in Cameron McEwen’s blog, McLuhan’s New Sciences.
Quote #5928
Year: 1959
Chapters: Language | Media as Form | Media Study
What use is there made of radio in the movie, because the form is then translated into another medium and some of its characteristics are high-lighted. What happens to a telephone in a Broadway play? What use is there made of telephone in drama which tells you a lot about the telephone?
“The Electronic Revolution in North America”, 1959, p 10
Quote #5929
Year: 1959
Chapters: Media Reprocess Media | Radio
What is your concept of the happening in relation to museums? Are museums happenings in the new sense of the word?
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 174
Quote #5930
Year: 1967
Chapter: Museum
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